


what we talk about when we talk about love

by srcgers



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: M/M, SteveTonyFest
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-20
Updated: 2015-07-20
Packaged: 2018-04-10 07:17:25
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,162
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4382393
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/srcgers/pseuds/srcgers
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A Raymond Carver title.<br/>Steve Rogers, from then to now, and everything he knows about love.</p>
            </blockquote>





	what we talk about when we talk about love

**Author's Note:**

  * For [laudatenium](https://archiveofourown.org/users/laudatenium/gifts).



> Written for the SteveTonyFest!

 

Six, and his body does not want him to stay alive. He lives in a tenement slum with rats and lice as his friends, one shared bathroom per floor and a bucket of water to flush. There are kids his age outside, their hands black from playing with coal and their mouths full of baked potato, chasing each other with sticks and Steve sees them and wishes he could run like that, throw bricks like that, laugh like that without his chest squeezing the breath out of his lungs. Six, and he knows his body is made of paper; and that his mother loves him so much, he feels as though he could catch on fire and light up like a firework at any moment. One of these days, he thinks, coughing so hard his chest rattles like a broken bicycle chain. One of these days, he thinks, as he breaks out into a cold sweat in the middle of the night, this will all be history.

 

* * *

 

“Jennifer. The new intern with red hair,” Natasha says over brunch one day, out of the blue and a little too casually, and Steve looks up from his plate, suspicious. Two months ago, they’d come across a double page spread recommending the Top 12 best brunch places in New York City and it had become something of a personal quest for them, much to the rest of America’s amusement, to visit every little café on that list. The owners take photos and stick multiple copies on their front doors, a fact that doesn’t seem to faze Tony, or Clint, or anyone else, for that matter, in the slightest when he tells this to them but has Steve slightly anxious, as though he’s been burdened now with the responsibilities of an amateur food critic and needs to think about what kind of choices he’s making when eating out. Captain America kind of has an image to uphold. Steve Rogers would eat fast food burgers with his hands and let grease drip onto shirt but Cap; Cap probably does yoga every morning and eats a lot of kale.

The sky is very blue where he’s at, and he can still remember a time when he woke up, back when he was deeply nostalgic and lost in every way a person can be lost. Sitting there, eating brunch with the sun on his back with a woman who smiles at him sometimes, fond and private, like they’re sharing an inside joke; he’s thinking that maybe he shouldn’t have been so quick to judge. It’s not so bad here. He doesn’t have bedbugs, for starters.

“What about her?” he asks, although he thinks he knows exactly where this is going.

Natasha smiles. “She’s interested.”

“What?” he blinks, “I thought she was going out with Glasses from Statistics,” he says, because that’s the kind of guy he is now, the kind who gossips about SHIELD agents and their love lives while eating poached eggs and mushrooms.

“No,” she gives him a look, “That’s Melissa.”

“Oh, right. Of course,” Steve says and tries to manoeuvre his eggs onto his toast without breaking the yolk.

“She loves dogs,” Natasha feels the need to point out.

“So do most people,” he counters, and sighs. “I’m not interested.”

Natasha sips her coffee, her eyes scrutinising him and he can feel it, can feel her gaze burning a hole into his skull and determinedly tries not to meet her eye. “I have one more,” she says, a hint of a smirk on her lips, and he shakes his head.

“No,” he says firmly.

“You’ll like this one,” she promises and he doesn’t say anything, because they both know she’s said that to just about the last twenty or so candidates. “You will,” she insists, upon seeing the doubtful look on his face and he narrows his eyes, waiting.

She takes another a sip of coffee. “Tony Stark,” she says, and he almost chokes when the words come out of her mouth.

“Excuse me?” he says, clearing his throat.

“Tony Stark,” she repeats. “Former CEO of Stark Industries.”

He stares.

“That man drives me up the wall, honestly, but I suppose he can be nice sometimes,” she says thoughtfully.

“Natasha,” he says, “What are you doing?”

She looks at him, then down at his plate and steals one of his cherry tomatoes. Which is exactly the kind of thing Natasha Romanov would do: send you into shock then take your tomato while you’re struggling to regain your breath. It’s cruel, and sneaky, and precisely why he loves her.

“I’m telling you what you want to hear,” she says.

 

* * *

 

Twelve, and there is blood in his mouth, smeared all over his tongue from a cut on the inside of his lip and it is a present from the boys who hold his collar and spit in his face, and the girls with cigarettes between their teeth who watch it all happen, thinking he will never get up again but each time, he does and each time, they laugh at his stupidity. He never learns, they say. Why does he do this, they ask when he goes to school sporting bruises the colour of sunsets: reds, and purples, and yellows. Why don't he just shut his trap and stay down? Twelve, and everyone knows about that Rogers kid, that skinny fella who can't scrounge up two dollars to rub together if his life depended on it, who would look death in the eye even as he is dragged off, kicking and screaming. He knows nothing about love except that it tastes like his mother's cooking; wouldn't know it unless it was written on the knuckles of some bully's fist, because he has only ever seen the absence of love and how hard it can punch.

 

* * *

 

Since waking up, Steve has felt like a card that’s been slipped into the wrong deck. A fish out of water. A spare part.

Though he remembers stepping out of that experiment a new man and chasing that HYDRA agent with a pair of lungs that never rattled and legs that didn’t tire, smashing into glass windows like they were cellophane and he was a bullet; though he knows now that eyes will never look through him again, not when he wears a uniform that has become less of the weapon he was made to be and more a symbol of war idealism and the American Dream, all he has to do is close his eyes and he is ninety five pounds again, a silhouette getting his teeth knocked out in every alley in Brooklyn.

Though he knows that she no longer remembers him from time to time, to him, Peggy Carter remains the hurricane that had swept him up and brought him into a new world, a place where he could see colour and girls wanted him and men sized him up. Peggy Carter, who had broken a man’s nose the day he met her, and whose promise he would later break — a date to which he will be seventy one years late. Peggy Carter, whose hand he held so gently he thought he might shatter into a thousand pieces.

Tony Stark visits her with him, sometimes, when he has time off from running a company and blasting intergalactic villains. She calls him Howard’s son and they both grimace because to Tony, it is a reminder that his legacy is not his own but one that is built on top of his father’s, one that he had no choice but to uphold; to Steve, it’s a reminder of just how much time has passed. One second, he is throwing his head back, laughing with Howard and the next, he is watching his forty year old son drink milk out of the carton.

Once, Tony had embodied everything that he rejected about the Twenty First Century; but five almost-deaths and a whole lot of late night meetings in the kitchen later, while Steve is making warm milk to help him sleep and Tony is brewing his fourth cup of coffee to get him through the night, he decides that there are worse things in life than a man with a goatee who makes elderly jokes while drinking from a kitty mug. How do you feel about Tony Stark? he gets asked in interviews, I hear you two didn’t get along at first. Steve says, We’re good friends, and means it.

Sometimes though, only sometimes, Tony is looking at him and waiting for an answer to a question he didn’t hear, and Steve wants him so much it feels like a pinch, or a knife, a bruise between his ribs that spreads and doesn’t fade. We’re good friends, he says, and sometimes, it feels like it’s not enough.

 

* * *

 

Fifteen, and he is still only skin and bones but now there is a kid in his life called James Buchanan Barnes, who he meets when he’s feeding a stray cat, a mangled old thing with fleas and one eye, in an alley that his blood all over it. There’s a Dutch kid with his shirt untucked who takes one look at James and with a smirk on his face, calls him a Mick, the word like poison on his tongue. James scowls and rolls his eyes, but Steve squares his bony shoulders and later, he’s tilting his head back to stop the blood from his broken nose dripping into his mouth. Steve says, You didn’t have to step in, I had him on the ropes. James says, Why did you do that? He is fifteen and has nothing better to do and sitting there, with rats running between their legs, he tells this boy with the warmest eyes he’d ever seen about his mother: that she is Irish, that it was her who taught him to always get up, and that she is very, very sick. He doesn’t know why tells him all that but how could he not, when there’s a kid looking at him with eyes like a bonfire and for the first time he can remember, there is no pity in them, just compassion and warmth and all the kindness in Brooklyn. When your name is Steve Rogers and you’re fifteen years old, with lungs that don’t work and bones that break like glass, eyes like that are just about the closest thing you can get to love.

 

* * *

 

Here is a fact: Steve has never felt like this, this slow wading into water, thinking he’s only getting his feet wet until someone asks him why he’s neck-deep and all he can say is: _Oh_.

Being in love with Tony Stark and not realising until your friend tells you, gently, like she’s revealing a secret she thought everyone already knew, is the same as dangling your legs on the edge of a cliff, or like eating apple pie straight out of the oven and burning the roof of your mouth. Tony has mechanic’s callouses on his hands and stashes cakes on windowsills, hides butter in his private bathroom so Pepper can’t find it and replace it with the low fat, healthier option of margarine, and is the kind of person who will sulk like a kicked puppy if you steal the remote but will forgive you easily for words as sharp as knives, lifetimes ago, on a helicarrier that carried a different person: a Steve who, when cut, bled nostalgia.

Tony, who tries so hard to fill the room with his presence, bad jokes and long, rambling stories about the waiter who couldn’t recognise him, so much that Steve doesn't have space for grief. Tony, who looks at him sometimes on the rare occurrences when they’re all sitting around and eating the breakfast that Sam made, with old eyes and like he wants to say something, like there are words on his tongue that were never meant to be kept secret until Thor walks in with no pants on and everyone starts shouting.

Tony, who texts him sometimes at two a.m. asking if he wants to eat ramen and watch the first season of Game of Thrones, on nights that are so cold and so lonely Steve is sure that every one else can feel it in their bones too, that sadness, the winter blues; when the Tower feels more like an empty space than the jutting building it really is. Maybe, Steve wonders, that’s why he made it so imposing: to fill in the blanks.

Tony, who understands. 

Steve says, once, “You just get it, don’t you?” and Tony stops what he’s doing, turning to face him, his expression unreadable. Steve says, very quietly, “I appreciate that.”

And just as he’s about to take his cup and head back to his own room, he pauses where he is and thinks.

“Can I tell you something?” he asks and he’s not looking at Tony anymore but if he was, he knows Tony would be watching him the same way he does over breakfast sometimes: with so much heaviness in his heart that Steve doesn’t know what to think, doesn’t know what to do with his hands. “Back when I was still adjusting, I didn’t know where I was going. Just that I wanted to leave.” He grips his cup a little tighter. “You are why I stayed.”

 

* * *

 

Nineteen, and he misses his mother so much, he thinks it might kill him. He has never understood how emptiness can feel so heavy until one night, he is crying into his pillow and Bucky in the next room is getting up to fetch him a glass of water, he realises that home was never a word that applied to places, but to people.

 

* * *

 

A building collapses in Harlem and Captain America is underneath it when it happens, had dived under to scoop up a fallen girl and thrown her into Hawkeye’s arms. 

Steve says he doesn’t remember anything after that, but he does. He remembers three things, in this order:

  1. Waking up amongst darkness, moments later, and imagining that he is drowning. He is thrashing to get a plane window open and it is so dark here, so silent under all this, that he is convinced the sun has gone down and they have given up on finding him. He is convinced that it has been another century, and he will have to be the man out of time again, and again, and again.

  2. A crushing pain from his waist down, his legs numb but not numb enough to stop him from feeling every bone in his leg being broken. His lungs are burning, his heart is fluttering like a bluebird and he thinks, for one, terrifying second, that he is actually going to die like this.

  3. Seeing all of them, digging at the rubble, their fingers snagging on glass shards until they are stained red and sliced right open. There is silence and they are all waiting for him, watching him to see the rise and fall of his chest. He can hear every tremor in their breaths and someone, somewhere, says his name like it could sink ships and end wars. He coughs, then, a wheezy thing that sounded like he was six again with asthma and no friends; and next to him, Tony closes his eyes, exhaling like he had just watched the world go up in flames.



 

* * *

 

Twenty six, and he is hanging off the edge of a train, is shattered like a broken bottle top and grieving, grieving because he has lost so many, has buried more friends than he can count: friends who were like family. He has muscles now and broad shoulders, and women catch his eyes from across the room and dance their way towards him, only his heart only goes out to one Peggy Carter, who had eyed him like that even before he was tall. He kisses her and tells her to wait for him as he is crashing a plane into the water. Twenty six, and the only thing Steve Rogers knows about love is the pain that comes afterwards. Wait for me to come home, he says, and then he holds his breath. It is as quick as suffocating: water in his lungs, salt in his throat, and ice, seventy years of it, surrounding him like a coffin.

 

* * *

 

“Take a walk with me,” Tony tells him one evening and Steve puts on a jacket. They eat from a line of food carts that are all of Steve’s favourites: hot dogs with all the trimmings, pasta in little boxes, and pizza slices that makes them both groan in appreciation. He has a suspicion that Tony placed them there simply for the benefit of their walk, even when he asks and Tony denies then distracts him with ice cream, because the more he thinks about it, the more it sounds like something Tony would do.

They head back home and in the lift, Tony presses for the roof. They had talked through all of the walking just minutes ago but now, standing together and Steve shivering with how warm it is suddenly, there is a silence that settles between them like the first blanket of snow. I love you too, Steve thinks.

Standing on top of Stark Tower, looking up at every star in the galaxy and their breaths icy cold, Steve’s skin is prickly and alive as he looks down on Manhattan, which is every bit as bright as he’d thought it was when he’d first woken up at its heart, lifetimes ago. It was the kind that made you look away: colours too saturated, too many lies before, and now, he sees that brightness reflected in the eyes of a man who was born into that too-much, and it makes him smile. Maybe that’s the thing about cities — they don’t change; you do.

And then Tony kisses him, slow and sure and right there on the highest level of the Stark Tower penthouse, with the New York City skyline on all sides like it was placed there just for them and this, he thinks — this, is what they mean when they talk about love. This is what all the loss and nostalgia has brought him to and he knows now, why it was all worth it.

 

* * *

 

_“I never know what to do with my hands. In pictures, they’re awkward. Making art, they’re tools. In danger, they’re weapons. But when I’m with you, somehow they’re all of it at once. I don’t know how to touch you without asking if you’re okay. I don’t know how to hold you without feeling like I’m gripping a million dollar painting in my hands. I don’t know how to feel you without wondering if either of us will explode. I never know what to do with my hands. But if you held them a little, I don’t think I’d have that problem anymore.”_ — K.P.K


End file.
